REVIEW
❯STEVEN SODERBERGHlooks
back in bemusement at
The Limey, the crime movie
that very nearly scuppered his
second big breakthrough
Tell ’em I’m
coming back
Here: ’60s icon Terence
Stamp brings it as
vengeful father Wilson,
looking into daughter
Jenny’s death. Below:
Director Steven
Soderbergh making
The Limey in 1999.ON THE SURFACE at least, The Limey made
sense. Having turned out a slick crime caper with
1998’s Out Of Sight and belatedly delivered on
the debut-movie promise of 1989’s sex, lies, and
videotape, Steven Soderbergh encored with a taut,
irreverent, culture-clash revenge thriller starring
’60s icon Terence Stamp. To the delight of critics,
the fi lm took a “cubist” (his word) editorial
approach that fi ltered its events through the
emotion-racked memory of its main character,
Wilson (Stamp), a cockney criminal seeking
revenge in LA for the death of his daughter.
However, audiences stayed away, and the fi lm
earned a paltry $3.2 million off a budget of
three times that.
Ye t The Limey is pure Soderbergh, strikingly
inventive and intriguingly playful, and remains
his greatest overlooked movie. Albeit one which,
he admits to Empire during an hour-long deep
dive into the 21-year-old lost classic, scared the
willies out of him while he was making it...It’s been just over 20 years since The Limey
came out. How do you feel about where it
sits in the Soderbergh fi rmament?
It’s a fi lm that generates very positive feelings for
me in terms of the result. That’s tempered by the
fact that it was a very fraught post-production.
It was a very intensive process editing the fi lm,
because it wasn’t shot to be put together the way it
ended up being put together. I was very concerned
at the time, not knowing if I was gonna be able to
get it to some sort of coherent shape, whether
my career was gonna stall just as it had gotten
restarted. I had to count to ten and take a deep
breath to stay focused. Because I was terrifi ed.The fragmented, ‘memory-vision’ approach
really distinguishes it from previous revenge
thrillers, like Point Blank and Get Carter. Is
that why you took it?
The fi lm came together very quickly. Out Of Sight
came out in the summer of ’98. [Screenwriter] Lem
Dobbs and I visited the folks at Artisan within
a month or two of that to pitch them the idea and
we delivered the movie nine months later. But
when I screened the fi rst cut for some friends
and family, it was clear I had a serious problem
on my hands. So serious that nobody off ered